The consumers of today expect a consistent quick service, extremely hygienic food with no compromise on the taste. This is what brings the need for automation in the food catering industry to serve nothing but perfect.
Manually adding each detail about a customer with precision is a nightmare. Automation of the catering business streamlines your business operations by keeping an extensive customer database handy. It also keeps a record of all the minute specificities that the customers want, which would otherwise be a long hectic process if done manually. Using technology would also ensure reduced human errors and thereby more efficiency.
The Benefits Of Automation In The Catering Business In India
Once we have registered the need for automation in the catering industry, we must look at the possible impact it will have on your business. The food catering business is not limited to kitty parties and corporate lunches. Instead, it requires a lot of expertise and insights to run this business instead.
A Point of Sale software allows you to cater to several companies at the same time, adjusting orders according to their individual requirements. Let’s look at this from another point of view. What happens if we don’t invest in automation technology for the food catering business? Be it a delay in order configuration, or the increasing dependency on labor effort for handling operations.
Not having an automated software to help you in your daily operations will make your work hectic, unorganized and much more prone to errors. Let’s look at each beneficial aspect that a POS software has in store for your food catering business.
i) Order Configuration And Billing
The food catering business thrives on online orders. It is essential that these orders are neither delayed or missed. Bringing in automation software for your business would not only increase the speed by which orders are taken up by your staff, but also ensure that none of the orders coming in is missed.
Imagine if there are multiple orders for a particular day for different companies. The number of people, menu and the per person cost is different for each company. It would be one hell of a task to maintain that kind of database manually. This is why bringing in automation for your food catering business becomes crucial today. There is a smaller window for mistakes and thus an overall improvement.
ii) Reducing Food Costs
Imagine a catering business where you cannot decide the right food costs and eventually go in loss even after taking all the measures for a successful business chain. It’s quite disheartening, right? Your automation software changes that for you.
It tells you an estimated cost of your dish by adding the price of each raw material in a particular dish. Once you’ve standardized your recipe in the software, it will automatically calculate the quantity of each raw material that goes in that dish and thereby help you reduce food costs.
This way, you are able to keep a check on the food costs and take corrective actions in case your food costs are high. The software will also predict future costing for you according to the pattern of costs of raw material.
iii) Reduced Wastage And Inventory Management
The next important thing in any business is to monitor your consumption and wastage. Anybody handling a food catering business knows about the losses that they bear because the raw materials go stale, or there is a lack in its continuous supply.
This brings about an absolute need for automation in the food catering business, to avoid losses and analyze the input and output data in time. A proper POS helps you to keep an eye on the requirements of raw material for the next day, the consumption of raw materials, the variance in a day and the losses occurred.
A detailed variance report helps you to identify the exact area where wastage is happening. Variance is the difference between the actual stock consumption and ideal stock consumption. A Variance between 4-5% is acceptable, anything more than that implies that there is undue wastage happening.
iv) Revenue Analysis For Increased Profits
Investing in any automation software would help you to increase your business by maintaining a complete record of your past customers, the menus that had been up for their event along with their feedback. Keeping such extensive information about each of your customers without the use of technology would be both laborious and troublesome.
You can now look from old records if the same customer comes up to you for another event. You are now well equipped with his earlier choices and can offer him/her the same now. This also helps in sustaining your customers and thereby increasing profits.
Having a detailed report of the profits generated and losses bared improves the way you run your business by directing you in the exact direction where there is a scope of improvement. A good POS maintains thousands of reports to accurately analyze the revenue generated.
v) Menu Engineering And Automatic Calculation Of Per Person Cost
It is needless to mention how important menu engineering is for the F&B industry, but it is also the most troublesome. Automation of your food catering business makes sure that you have the right menu for each organization depending on their needs. The menu is generated automatically based on the order configuration.
For instance, if a customer/company has placed a catering order for 15 items for breakfast, and 20 for lunch and dinner, you can generate the individual menu for these sessions. You can customize your best dishes and put them on top of your menu or choose a group of dishes and name them under ‘Breakfast Menu’. Along with creating the right menu, you could also calculate per person cost, on the basis of the dishes included.
vi) Recipe Management
Consistency of your food items is one major way to retain your customers. Automation in your food catering business should be able to maintain consistency in your dishes by using standard recipes everywhere. Recipe management, in turn, leads to reduced food costs and thus increased profits.
All in all, automation in the food catering business ensures definite growth in your business by retaining maximum customers. Once you give them consistency, precision, and regularity, they would never want to leave you.
